This invention relates to an apparatus and method of dehumidifying a body of air within a chamber.
A number of processes suffer because the chamber in which these processes are performed has too great a moisture content. Such processes include the spray painting of articles such as vehicles in a spray booth.
Venting the spray booth may be sufficient where the chamber has been used to prewash, for example, a vehicle because the humidity outside the chamber is lower than inside the chamber and therefore the humidity can be reduced to equal that of outside the chamber. However frequently the humidity outside of the chamber is sufficiently high to adversely affect the quality of the finish achieved and it is desirable to further reduce the humidity of air within the spray booth, and simply venting air through the booth does not achieve a sufficient reduction in humidity.
One method of decreasing relative humidity under these circumstances is the provision of a cooling plate wherein a refrigeration unit is used to cool the cooling plate so that moisture condenses out of the air within the chamber, and is then diverted into a collecting tank or a drain. A problem with this means of removing of moisture from the chamber is that the provision of a refrigeration plant is expensive, bulky and is energy consuming to operate.
One object of this invention is to provide an arrangement or a method for reducing relative humidity of a body of air within a chamber in a simple yet effective manner.
A further object of one form of this invention is to provide for a method of spray painting with reduced relative humidity.